[OT]UN operations

----- Original Message -----
From: "John Leary" <john_t_leary@yahoo.com>

> > From: "John Leary" <john_t_leary@yahoo.com>
> >
> > > If the UNSC uses veterens, they are not allowed to
> > > have ammo, as they might offend the locals who
> > > have genocides to complete.
> While you may consider the remark 'snide', the
> history of UN operations supports the comment.

Not as far as I'm informed. The Osprey Elite on 'UN Forces 1948-1994
lists
29 US operations in that period, including the Korean War and the Gulf
War.

The only ones where the UN (at the urging of over-wary member states)
abandoned people to genocide are Rwanda and Kosovo. 2 out of 29 is bad
enough, but not really typicel.

Now if you had said 'have a WAR to complete', that might have been more
accurate.

And before you argue that Korea and the Gulf War were US-led operations,
so
was, in practice, Somalia. If you have read 'Black Hawk Down' (highly
recommended, BTW), you should know it was US political and military
leaders
who botched that operation. Either attribute both blame and success to
the
UN, or claim the blame with the success for US.

>      It helps define the operational abilities
> in reguard to historical effectiveness.
> ...history repeats itself.
> ...organizational inertia.
> ...power corrupts.
>
> So, unless there is a REALLY REMARKABLE adjustment
> in UN operations command, nothing will change.

Hmmm. 'Nothing will change'.
60 years ago, there was no UN
120 years ago, there was not even a League of Nations
180 years ago, most of the nations now in the UN didn't exist.

The GZG canon UN is 180 years in the future.
Even for such notoriously conservative institutions as the Catholic
Church
or the Chinese Empire, 180 years is a time in which a lot can happen. I
would be hard put to think of a period of 2 centuries where 'Nothing'
changed in either of those.

Z.Lakel's idea of a fairly efficient UN military in the Tuffleyverse is
as
believable as yours of a bumbling bureaucratic mob.

Greetings
Karl Heinz